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| Review by Lily Fierro |
Daniel Clowes is a pissy man…but he’s a terrifyingly acute and clever man.
If you opened this review, you most likely know that his acerbic sense of humor and wit and ability to understand people’s sometimes awful inclinations is why you will pick up anything by the acclaimed author of Ghost World.
However, if you’re new to Daniel Clowes’ work, you’re in luck!
This month, Fantagraphics Books released The Complete Eightball, a collection of issues 1-18 of his series Eightball, to showcases his style, his voice, and his many subjects of ire.
The Complete Eightball in total contains nearly 600 pages of insanity and fun, but before I dive in, I should begin with a confession; I’ve never been a huge Clowes fan.
As so many have done, I started off with Ghost World (film and comic) and then Art School Confidential (just the film) as my introduction, and I simply found Clowes’ sense of humor and contempt for people unsettling and heavy-handed, and for some time, I labeled Clowes as an author and artist who I just could not connect with.
Thus, up until I received the opportunity to review The Complete Eightball, I steered clear of Clowes associated publications.
Despite my initial biases, after reading the collection, I realized that the stories of The Complete Eightball represent the heart and soul of independent comics. They’re crude, outrageous, blunt, and strange (signature of the Clowes technique), but ultimately they expose a truth about our own existence and the society we live in today.
And in true independent spirit, some of the comics in the collection succeed and others fail, but the output at least attempts to strive for something different, be it the narrative, the structure, or the characters.
In the earliest issues of Eightball, the serialized story, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron rises as one of the most original, lurid, and fascinating plots that Clowes will ever create. One day, Clay sees his runaway wife in a disturbing sado-masochistic adult film, and he ventures out to find more details about the film and the whereabouts of his wife. Unfortunately, his quest is nowhere near as easy as he expects.
On his travels, he runs into a cult warning of the clash between the sexes where women will unite and overthrow all men, police officers who may or may not be part of one of the world’s greatest secret societies, a woman mutated by the chemicals in the lake where her mom once swam, and a dog with no orifices that carries a secret under all of its hair. Clay’s journey to find his wife quickly spirals out of control, and reality and fantasy weave in and out of the Clay’s existence, his memories, and the movies his wife may or may not be starring in.
Beyond the complex and bizarre Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron, the early issues contain short stories commenting on the state of everything a person may experience ranging from working in the comic book industry to contemplating suicide to encountering satanic cults or modern archetypes of terrible people. With all of the stories, caricatures, exaggerations, and outspoken humor come together to reveal an honest assessment and evaluation of what evils plague our current society and how they quietly manifest in our lives. In particular, the Young Dan Pussey stories, I Hate You Deeply, I Love You Tenderly, Ugly Girls, and Playful Obsession stand out as some of the strongest from Eightball issues 1-10, the ones in the first volume of the collection.
And most impressively, these stories, their characters, and their parodies continue to hold up to today’s post Internet world even though Clowes created them in a pre-Internet age.
The second volume of the collection (prefaced by insightful and comedic notes about the making of issues 1-10), introduces the extended series Ghost World, the series that would eventually be collected into a graphic novel. I’ll skip my thoughts on Ghost World, since I’ve already addressed that, but I will mention that Ghost World demonstrates a marked shift in style and content for the Eightball series. Introduced as comics written after Clowes’ move to Berkeley, California, the second volume, containing issues 11-18, has fewer fantasy and outlandish characters and plots and focuses more on parodying reality.
While the issues of the second volume lose the frenetic energy and outlandishness of the first ten issues of Eightball, issues 11-18 contain the strongest dialog and observational realism to offer comments on society. Occasionally bordering the line of conversation and discourse, some of the stories toe the edge of pretension or sanctimoniousness, but with the imaginary layers removed, new topics can be intelligently addressed by the stories.
For example, The Party releases the cynical thoughts by a 20 something at a party. Buddy Bradley In “Who Would You Rather Fuck: Ginger or Mary Ann,” jabs at 90s youth culture (that dreaded term the Generation X). Ectomorph reveals the hypocrisy a man experiences when it comes to body image. Blue Italian Shit recounts the ups and downs of living with a roommate in a city. And, Hippypants and Peace Bear in “Question Authority,” uncovers the hypocrisy of hippies who espouse political thoughts they do not live by.
The stories of Eightball’s issues 11-18 represent the solidification of Daniel Clowes’ voice and semi-realistic style that we know him for.
Given the shifts in approaches between volume one and volume two, one of the joys of reading The Complete Eightball in sequence and all together is the ability to see Clowes’ growth and experimentation in drawing and storytelling. Critical, skeptical, and funny, The Complete Eightball deserves a read from both new and old Clowes fans to see the trajectory of Eightball itself and Clowes as a rising voice in independent comics.
The Complete Eightball makes you laugh and cringe, but, most importantly, it makes you contemplate on the people you meet along with what you say and how you act as an individual. Eightball has a rare gift in its ability to provoke both self-reflection and increased societal awareness, placing it in the high ranks of Harvey Kurtzman’s Jungle Book and Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor.
Finally, I understand why Fantagraphics and much of the independent comic book world love Daniel Clowes.
